[ardour-dev] Using ardour2 in anger...

[Sampo Savolainen]

Quoting Nick Murtagh <nickm at go2.ie>:

> Hi!

Hello!

Reading the topic, i was already readying my "hey, it's a beta and you can't
expect it to perform well" speech! ;)

> I did some recording with my band on Sunday using ardour2 build from 
> subversion on Saturday. It went very well, it's the most stable of any
> version of ardour I've used in the past.

That's funny, I also used 2.0 (revision something around saturday) on sunday.

> We were recording 10 tracks simultaneously and ended up with about
> an hour and a half of material saved in one ardour session.
> 
> Here are some observations from the recording session:
> 
>    * Ardour2 doesn't remember which tracks have been record enabled.
> This
>      is annoying when you have to re-arm 10 tracks...

I don't quite understand, you make it sound like ardour 0.99 does this? You
can set up mix groups to make the mute/solo/rec buttons affect all channels
in the active group. The other option is to use ctrl-shift-arm which arms
all tracks.

>    * After recording a few songs and pressing stop, the log window came
>      up with lots of messages about peak files being unavailable. I
>      closed the log window but it kept coming up (a bit annoying in
>      itself - if I close the log window I obviously am not interested in
>      log messages!). A couple of tracks were missing waveforms. Closing
>      ardour and restarting restored the missing waveforms.

This is very strange and we will try to remedy it. The problem is that we're
not exactly sure where it comes from. (Maybe someone else knows more, Paul?)

>    * Ardour2 crashed when I clicked "Play from location" on a location
>      marker (not sure if that's the correct menu item, I'm typing this
>      from memory).
> 
>    * Another crash happened at random and took gnome-panel with it?! I
>      saw this happen at least twice. No idea how to reproduce, sorry :(

Crashes with no backtrace or duplication recipe are of no use to us. Sorry...

http://ardour.org/debugging_ardour

>    * Location bar font size is too big

Can you post a screenshot? What sort of screen does your laptop have?

On my D820 with a 1920x1200 screen, there are a lot of fonts which are too
large. This might be a problem with pango though, but it's also possible
that we're just specifying the font sizes the wrong way.

>    * When the session gets long the clock's digits don't fit in the box
>      anymore, they get clipped, the box should really expand or else the
>      font should get smaller

Can you get a screenshot of this as well? (you can probably get one
screenshot which shows both issues)

>    * Scrolling left and right causes lots of disk activity and the UI
>      hangs for several seconds - sometimes over 10 seconds. This is a
>      pretty big session running on a brand new Dell D420 with a 4200RPM
>      disk, so maybe this is expected? I got the "your machine is too
>      slow" message a couple of times - but only from scrolling (is
> ardour
>      loading the peak data at this point) not from playback or
> recording.

4200RPM disk can be a bit slow for heavy usage. Especially since in a laptop
it's usually also the only disk so that disk will handle applications,
swapping and the session.

>    * ardour2 + jack + ubuntu edgy + D420 + hdsp = rock solid, no xruns
>      during recording or playback.

My session went very well too, also with a hdsp (multiface) and ubuntu edgy.
I too had some crashes though..

"Crashes are there to be fixed", is my motto though.. ;)

> In summary, ardour2 rocks and I would have no hesitation using it for
> all my future recording. Thanks Paul and everyone who's been working on
> this!

Cheers

    Sampo